The Story of an Australian Farm: Olive Schreiner in Australia

The quotations from The Story of an African Farm (1883) that Patrick White chooses as epigraphs to the first and last sections of The Aunt’s Story (1948) signal Olive Schreiner’s importance to him. The Aunt’s Story is a seminal novel for White and in Australian literature. Our essay revisits the presence of Schreiner in White’s work – often noted by scholars, seldom explored. To do so we reconsider the publication and reception of Olive Schreiner’s work in Australia and its reading by Australians in the half-century preceding White. We thus explore the influence of African Farm on Catherine Martin, Catherine Helen Spence, Miles Franklin and Henry Handel Richardson; and Schreiner’s connection to Australia through close personal friend, Henry Havelock Ellis. Charting the circulation of African Farm elucidates both the importance of Schreiner’s work to the development of Australian modernism and how the figures and concerns of her work were transformed in this process of circulation.